Special Delivery Almost Foils Passport Plans

Jim Spencer

August 26, 1998|By JIM SPENCER Daily Press

In 1921, more than three-quarters of a century ago, a midwife in Anderson County, S.C., delivered Hattie Calm into this world. Neither the midwife nor Calm's parents bothered to register her birth with state health officials.

Until recently that didn't make any difference to Calm. She was too busy and too poor to go anywhere. Now, a friend wants to take Calm on a cruise. Now, Calm's friend has prepaid a nonrefundable $900 for that cruise. Now, Calm's lack of a birth certificate is a very big deal.

On Aug. 10 the State Department turned down Calm's first attempt to get a passport, saying she lacked the proper identification. An unsigned letter from the State Department's regional passport agency in New Orleans informed her that she needed "alternative documentation."

With her cruise scheduled to depart Miami on Sept. 7, Calm couldn't sleep. She spent most of her time praying that she'd be able to take the first real vacation of her life. If not, she prayed that Carrie Clarke, the nurse whose family had picked up the tab for Calm's cruise, wouldn't lose money.

"If I had known it was going to be like this," said Calm, "I would have rather gone to Norfolk to the zoo."

Clarke was plenty upset, too. "If you pay your taxes and never ask for anything except to take a trip, and they won't let you, that's cold," she said.

Considering how Calm has lived her life, it is almost inconceivable.

By any measure other than the State Department's, 77-year-old Hattie Calm is a model American citizen. She's a registered voter. She drives a domestic automobile. She has a Social Security card. She belongs to a church. She helps lead the crime watch in her working-class Hampton neighborhood.

Calm has lived in that neighborhood for 52 years in the same immaculately kept bungalow. Before retiring to tend the flower beds that dot her long, narrow yard, she served food to disabled veterans at Hampton's regional VA hospital.

"My husband was a cook there," Calm said. "He died in 1982. We weren't educated people, but it was work, and it was honest."

When she wasn't helping the vets, she was taking care of kin.

"I've always been the heavy in the family as far as work and looking after people," she said.

Her commitment endeared her to Clarke. The two of them struck up a relationship several years ago after heart problems hospitalized Calm. They became like mother and daughter. When Clarke's son offered to send his mom on a cruise with a friend, the nurse knew exactly who to invite.

Her old friend had spent a lifetime doing for others. She raised five children. All of them are grown now, all gainfully employed.

"I got a deputy," Calm said proudly. "I got a barber. I have one who works as a clerk-typist at Fort Eustis. I have one who's a long-distance truck driver and one who's a construction worker."

Wherever they work, all of Calm's kids have birth certificates and aren't likely to ever have to go through what their mom did.

"You'd think I was a criminal," she said. "It makes me feel like nobody, like I never existed. That's the part that hurts, that I don't exist."

The news sent Calm on a panicked search for baptismal records, her marriage license, anything to prove to the State Department that she was alive and a legal resident of the United States. Calm already had written to the health department in South Carolina, which eventually sent a letter confirming what she already knew: The state has no record of her birth.

Calm forwarded that letter, along with copies of her marriage license, her Virginia driver's license and her civil service retirement card, to New Orleans a couple of weeks ago.

Following up on her appeal was a nightmare. Many telephone numbers at the passport agency connected only to tape-recorded voices.

On Monday, a spokesman from Royal Caribbean cruise line, Rich Steck, said if the government refused to issue Calm a passport, she could still fill out an affidavit at the pier, swearing to her American citizenship.

The affidavit, along with her Virginia driver's license, would allow Calm to board the cruise ship, according to Steck.

On Tuesday, it took me six phone calls to the State Department to talk to a real person about Calm's case.

That person was a press spokeswoman in the Office of Consular Affairs in Washington, someone 1,000 miles from New Orleans, someone for whom Calm never would have known to ask.

Tuesday afternoon, the lady from consular affairs reported to me that she had called New Orleans. She said Calm's passport would be issued that very day.

When I called and gave Hattie Calm the word, she burst into tears.

She cried not just because she'd get to take her vacation, but because finally, her hard, honest life had been reaffirmed.